bring a coach into your life, for FREE

Checking my email this morning, I realize that I've surrounded myself with coaches of one kind of another this year.  I'm receiving a lot of blogs in my in-box, reads that support my desire to keep my focus on the big purpose for 2012 -- my emancipation as a writer.  This is the whole reason I've begun this practice of waking at 4:30 am on the weekdays.

Not to mention all that email means I need more time to read and think.

So, like I said, I'm reading a lot of coaches.  And oh, coincidentally, the person I declined to carpool with to death camp a few weeks ago is also a coach.  Imagine how excited I would have been when that little factoid was unwrapped in the car as we shared the ride to and from Sebastopol.  And she seems totally awesome.  We're having coffee this coming Friday, so yay!

Click to read more ...

Little daily steps to GSD

Really the only problem I had with Peter Bregman's 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction and Get the Right Things Done was that I kept expecting it to only take me 18 minutes to read it.  I was impatient with some parts of the book, wanting him to get to the point already, so I could move on to other books in my list, to all the essential work this book was making me want to tackle.  That said, I definitely think it was the right read for me at the right time and am recommending it in the following context.

I've been wanting to read this book for a few months, ever since I "discovered" Bregman via a link on my LinkedIn homepage to an article of his on the Harvard Business Review on-line.  The piece was useful, I subscribed to his email list and added a used copy of his book to my Amazon.com cart.  Now, 14 days after delivery, here we are.  I'm done, have a few pages of notes and am ready to make some changes to how I approach every day, thanks to 18 Minutes.

Click to read more ...

Day 7: almost there

Smoothie 7? Check!

OK, so as I mentioned elsewhere, this was a tough morning, one on which I nearly caved and made myself a delectable slice of toast.  Which would be completely absurd considering that I'm almost done, have almost completed this 7-day body cleanse de-tox that I embarked on last Saturday with the wonderful Dr. Kate Tenney, ND.  How silly would that be, to bail when the finish line is in sight?  It's really amazing how many rationalizations my little brain came up with, one after another, reasons why it really doesn't matter one way or the other which day it is, etc., etc., and you know you're just going back to the wheat-teat anyway, just get it over with.

Reminded me of this, by Peter Bregman, on why it's hard to keep resolutions.  It's not the motivation.  We generally have that in spades.  It's follow-through.  It's not letting our brains derail us.  Like mine almost did this morning.

I'm not going to lie. With the end so near, the oh-fuck-it voice was the loudest.  But instead of reaching for my beloved Dave's Killer Bread when I opened the freezer, instead it was the frozen mixed berries, of which I had just enough left for this morning's smoothie.  And because, honestly, at this point the taste of the so-called Medical Food is something I'm so over, yes, I threw a banana in there.  And then wondered, while drinking down its deliciousness, whether that was really so different after all than caving in to the bread.

Look, the list of things I've learned from this 7-day experience is long.  I think finally the whole food pH thing has really sunk in to a bone-level with me, something I've been resisting ever since Crazy Loretta (my former eyebrow technician) became its chief apostle about 10 years ago.  [Come to think of it, Crazy Loretta has been on the cusp on a lot of health issues, not just the pH, but she was the first person I ever heard talk about green juice, loaned me books years and years ago on the subject.   Hmmmm, crazy but prescient? Interesting.  But still crazy.]  Also, I have a new and deep appreciation for how sweet actual food can be, like aforementioned banana.  An apple?  Completely candy sweet.  So good.  And of all the things I've been craving -- toast, steak, toast, butter, cream in my  coffee -- note that sugar hasn't come up once.  No chocolate?  That's nuts!  I thought I couldn't live without it and now look at me, doing just fine.

I'm not sure what I will do tomorrow, how I will return to the Land of the Eating.  I do not, DO NOT, want to have become a fussy eater who says No to everything and has to bring her own food everywhere and is on some stringent impossible plan.  But I do want more greens on my plate and I want to stay plugged in to this awareness of how my food feels once I've eaten it.  That's just so precious.  And hard-won.

Oh, and I want some chicken.  Let's be clear about that.

XX

Resolutions, shared, more powerful

Woody Guthrie's resolutions for 1942 have been making the rounds for a few weeks. In case you didn't see them, they go like this.  I love that they're handwritten, along with doodles, at the middle of the book, and include beating fascism and wearing clean clothes.

It got me to thinking about how interesting it would be to see certain people's resolutions at key moments in their lives.  These people wouldn't necessarily know at the moment they wrote their resolutions that the coming year would turn out to be key, but with the benefit of hindsight, we'd all go, Duuuuuude, that was so prescient.  Like, for example, if Rosa Parks had it as a resolution in 1954 to change up her seat on the bus.  I'm making light of a huge thing she did, in fun, just to illustrate what I'm talking about.

I did a very fast search on Amazon and nothing turned up, so a book of resolutions hasn't been done yet.  Who wants to take that on?  Of course, it's now on my List of all the books I wish I had time to write, but until someone decides that they want to sponsor me so that I can devote myself 24/7 to this and other projects such as my field guide to the American Douche, then this blog is about it.

So, given my interest in reading other people's resolutions, natch I was very intrigued when I received email from Daily Candy earlier today, with the following tease:

It was definitely a let-down that clicking through just lands one on a slide-show of things the editors plan to buy this year to support their resolutions (although I won't lie: there are a couple of items that I fell immediately in love with, like the magnetic egg-cup train and the self-publishing kiosk and the espresso machine).  But still I liked this smidgen of insight.  Like I wrote elsewhere, I love hearing about other people's resolutions -- such a quick hit of what that person really cares about, really wants, like you're mainlining their essence for a sec.  

The Harvard Business Review blogger Peter Bregman had a really interesting bit in an interview that I listened to yesterday, about how most people don't keep their resolutions because  their fear of failure prevents them from making resolutions about the things they really, really care about.  Like you don't want to make a resolution that "this is the year I write my novel," because if you fail, then it means you're not really a writer.  And that scares you.  So you don't make that resolution; instead you resolve something that doesn't go straight to your heart, to your idea of who you really are, like the novel does.  Instead you resolve something about not biting your nails or being friendlier to strangers.  Something you don't really care about and which you can let go, in a few weeks, when your favorite show finally comes back on or whatever.

The key to success, Bregman says, is to make resolutions about things you really do care about.  And then to keep those resolutions right in front of your nose, integrating them into what you do every day, so that they don't exist in a separate dimension apart from your daily transactions.

For me, another key is sharing what your resolutions are, so that you're more accountable.  Saying them out loud makes them more powerful, give them form.  Volume gives them volume, ho ho ho.  But I'm kind of a weirdo who dreams of friendships in which we share things like this, things like our resolutions for the year, and then have lunch once a month and talk about how it's going.  That's my idea of dreamy: a Saturday lunch with friends and notebooks, maybe a glass of something sparkly and a tasty plate of food, listening and cheering and dreaming.  That would be sweet, indeed, and so real, so much better than catching up on details, details we can all read about on-line anyway.

As I'm completing my resolutions project for this year, I'm really taking Bregman's words into account -- really making sure that I am resolving about things that truly matter to me, that have the potential to be life-changing.  Sure, there's always the nest-egg resolution but what about the rest, the really juicy stuff?  What about the book?  What about getting paid to write?  

It's about keeping the map on the dashboard, just staying focused on what you really want.  And who doesn't need help with that?  By sometime in the middle of next week, I'll be posting my resolutions here, as a way of giving them volume.  And if you want to email me your list, I'm so your Resolution Buddy.  

Let's Go Big this year.  It's time.

XX